| Group |
Slavic (with Polish,
Bulgarian etc.), Eastern branch (with Russian
and Belorussian) |
| Geography |
The official language of Ukraine, the language is also spoken by emigrants
from Ukraine in Canada, Australia, USA, and by minorities in Belarus and
in Russia. The number of speakers exceeds 38 million people. |
| History |
Together with Belorussian and Russian, Ukrainian is an offspring of
the Old Russian language spoken in Kiev Russia in the middle ages. Developing
separately under the Polish rule, Ukrainian has generated a number of unique
features in ts structure. The oldest document of the language is the Grammar
by L.Zizanij (1596). The modern literature language was born in the late
18th century. |
| Phonetics |
Ukrainian has some traits making it different from the other East Slavic
languages: the old sounds [e] and [o] can be interchanged by [i], especially
in the closed syllable (e.g. Ukr. Lviv vs. Russian Lvov);
consonants are not softened before [e]. The letter g represents
a fricative faringal sound, similar to New Greek [g]
- this can be a result of Iranian influence in the first centuries of AD. |
| Morphology |
Ukrainian has preserved a developed inflection system including the
vocative case which is lost in Russian. The noun endings in dative and
locative cases of the masculine gender are -ovi, -evi. In
the system of the verb, the future tense remains synthetic for both the
perfective and the imperfective aspect. In general, Ukrainian morphology
remains archaic with a number of types of declension and conjugation, preserving
3 genders, 2 numbers, etc. All these features make it quite close to its
relatives Belorussian and Russian. |
| Lexicon |
The Ukrainian vocabulary is based on the colloquial language. The language
policy is mainly to create new words using the native roots instead of
acquiring foreign ones. This makes the language more pure in the terms
of science and technology. Still, a great lot of Russian words were borrowed
into Ukrainian in the last three centuries. |
| Writing |
Cyrillic alphabet |
| Close Contacts |
Russian |
| Sample |
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| Picture |
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| More info |
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